How to Find Your Training Sweet Spot

That was the happy conclusion of an email from a friend I’ve been talking through some performance (and weight) ups and downs this year. His new secret to collecting Strava bling: slowing down. As he started spending more training time in lower heart-rate zones, his overall speed went up when he put the hammer down.

This sounds totally counterintuitive to today’s “go hard or go home” ethos. #BeastMode is now #EverydayMode for many riders thanks to the soaring popularity of HIIT (high-intensity interval training), which has been at the top of annual workout trend charts for the past 10 years.

Admittedly, HIIT was a necessary response to the popularity of the low-and-slow fat burning philosophy from the opposite side of the training spectrum. A model popularized by pro roadies since around the late 1960s, low-intensity steady state (or LISS) training had riders avowing themselves to weeks—sometimes months—of inner-chainring, base-building rides before letting their heart rate crack 70 percent. The problem with these all-or-nothing training trends is that they tend to permeate cycling circles and dominate. In the real world, science backs a more balanced approach to training.

In the high-intensity corner, research comparisons of HIIT with longer, lower intensity endurance training report that HIIT yields greater improvements in VO2 max and lactate threshold, and works just as well—if not better—for increasing the size and number of your mitochondria, the building blocks of your energy-generating engine.

While low-intensity riding also builds mitochondria, it offers other unique physiological benefits that’ll get you fitter and faster as well. When you pedal along at conversational pace, your lower left heart chamber has time to fill fully between contractions, and over time, it increases its capacity to pump more blood per beat, lowering your heart rate. By chilling out, you also build so many oxygen- and nutrient-delivering capillaries in your legs that it looks like a Silly String war was waged in your quads.

You gotta go slow to get fast.”

We know, the concept of slowing down to get faster sounds paradoxical, but it’s true. “Because zone two—endurance-paced rides—produces the best results to improve lactate clearance capacity,” says mitochondria researcher Inigo San Millan, Ph.D., and professor at University of Colorado School of Medicine. The better your type-I slow-twitch fibers can recycle the lactate your type-II fibers are pumping out, the longer you can go faster and harder.

As beneficial as both HIIT and LISS may be, leaning too hard in either direction doesn’t work. I’ve seen high-intensity junkies crash through their crumbling foundation 90 minutes into a long ride and endurance-only riders burn out long before finding their spark. To be a successful cyclist, you need to work both ends of the spectrum, as well as that sweet spot in the center, popularly known as “no man’s land” or “junk miles.”

Cyclists today tend to be all-arounders. That means you can be riding or racing year round—fat biking, gravel riding, cyclocross racing, road riding, mountain biking, Zwifting—so you need to skew your training to match your goals, sliding toward more intensity during times you want to be sharp and toward lower intensity when you’re starting to build toward a big goal.

I like to call this the Goldilocks approach to training, in which you aim for three key rides a week: one high-intensity interval ride or “Oh man, I’m dying!”, one low-intensity endurance ride or “Oy, this is too easy!”, and one somewhere right in the middle that leaves you thinking, “Ah, that feels just right.” This approach works wonders because it taps into all the muscle fibers and energy systems you use when you ride and compete. To do it: Warm up for 10 to 15 minutes before and cool down after the workouts at right. Perform each once or twice a week.

HIIT It Hard

Hit your max—literally. Push hard for the interval; then go easy for a quick recovery. Repeat 8 to 10 times for one set. Rest 5 minutes, then repeat the set. Pick from these:

40 seconds on/20 seconds off

30 seconds on/30 seconds off

20 seconds on/10 seconds off

Perform each on-interval at 95 to 100 percent max heart rate (MHR), 100 to 130 percent functional threshold power (FTP), and 9 to 10 on rate of perceived exertion (RPE).

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